Busy, busy, busy! Fled, after my morning meeting, to the bank and Malibu and back again. The misty garden smelling of jasmine and other, sweeter perfumes. I love the way the garden evolves. Wood chip paths and great forests of Euphorbia down where the goats will live.
Meeting with lawyer re. company in Santa Monica-where I also bought English chocolate and piccalilli. Had stove and blender fixed. Kept an eye on Blankstein grilling via NPR. Even if it is just political theatre it’s fun to think that this most ghastly of all men-Blankstein is having to play the villain role for all to see.
Goldman Sachs is just another human empire and it will eventually fail as they all do-eventually. It is the way we do things here on earth.
Human being/Human doing.
The Christian Louboutin party at the Robertson store with the great man in attendance (wearing lilac slacks) was a very friendly, if soulless affair.
‘A’ gays including the poisonous Peter Dunham with his age defying boyfriend the celebrity dermatologist Peter Kopelson-we often take time ignoring one another passing on Runyon Canyon. Peter Dunham, hideously scarred by acne and HIV, making small talk at the edge of the room with similarly scarred reptilians. Peter’s talentless, screeching ‘artist’ friend Konstantine Kakanias arrived bound in a flimsy scarf that did nothing to distract from his unusually fat face. Oh how one loves to loathe. The most amusing line from Konnie’s on-line resume- Second Prize, International Award for blah blah blah…who the fuck boasts about coming second?
As well as the gays, some of whom I liked by the way-none of whom were wearing CL shoes there was a contingent of Iranian women with huge asses squeezed into badly cut denim jeans tottering around on red soled CL hooker heels. These dusky gals baying for their photograph taken with Christian who willingly obeyed as only a man can when he is selling most of these women over a thousand pairs of his shoes-each! It was like a fetish party. I didn’t recognize any of the women other than the ubiquitous Tracy Ross-saw her at Prada party too. Dull.
One woman arrived in McQueen but the ensemble was so badly put together she looked like a Michael Jackson Halloween clone. Sad.
There have been a glut of ‘recessionary chic’ soiree held in small stores across Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, usually with red carpet facilities but there was none last night. Tomorrow will be the shoe-signing event when Christian signs shoes. My friend Jamie is going, one might want to link to her blog to find out how that went.
Dinner with Peter Scarf at the Mercantile before he went off to drink at some hip club somewhere.
Sweet, late night conversations with lamb head made me content and happy before I slept. Oh, if only..
British class shame is nothing a regular gun-toting American would or should know anything about. Whether or not one has an understanding of manners, social hierarchy or top hats is neither here nor there.
I have spent blog time bashing America but really, the Brits are just as bad-if not worse. My friend Pierre in New York, upon moving here at the behest of his company, missed London terribly but after a short while, much less time than I, understood why we come here and why we want to stay. Pierre began to notice a change in himself and those around him. He felt valued, pumped up, fearless. In America he could feel like a man.
Like me, when he meets Brits who stay at home he marvels at their naivety.
It takes a huge amount of self-loathing to ‘know your place’.
In the USA there is no shame about bettering and reinventing ones self. There are rules, of course, but every one of the rules (guiding principles) is designed to be broken.
You may have to pay a disgruntled employee a ton of money for a spurious sexual harassment claim but that’s how the dispossessed get their share of the pie.
Everyone is on the make, everyone! It’s an on the make, nickle and dime affair that I am having with the USA. It’s better than pecan pie and nuclear waste! It’s more thrilling than Guantanamo Bay.
As a Brit I still hanker after public art and healthcare but the rampant small mindedness of my countrymen, their embittered jokes masquerading as irony, their post imperialist arrogance and their total inability to allow anyone to grow beyond the class they were born into keeps me from going back home.
I suppose for all my anti-American sentiment I love the hurly-burly, the hegemony, the extremes, the greed, the excess, the stupidity. I love their terror of art and history. I applaud their dogma and their denial. I love that they think that they are the very best at everything they do when they are patently not. I love that they behave like willful children. I love that they think knowing about nature or food is elitist. I love that an engaging presidential candidate can emerge from nowhere and take the world stage-where as the British produce a bunch of familiar, threadbare politicians like so many provincial repertory actors delivering lackluster performances in what passes for political theatre. Imagine British MP’s sitting in their shared dressing-room waiting for lurid makeup to be applied before performing their ‘great scene’ during Prime Ministers Question Time. Smoking, sinking rummers of whiskey, discussing their expense claims, squabbling over cabinet positions and who’ll wear what at the state opening of parliament.
We don’t cast our parliament terribly well. Here they cast the Whitehouse like a huge movie. No wonder Rahm and Ari Emmanuelle are behind Barrack. They recognized his star potential and like a baby starlet hanging out in the Chateau Marmont plucked him from obscurity and handed him the best role ever in their box office blockbuster political thriller-so whilst the Emmanuells steal the money they got themselves the bestest alibi ever..a black president. They got themselves a well-dressed first lady descended from slaves. They got tears of joy at the inauguration and a divided, blind sided America whilst the spoils of the middle class were being divided up by unscrupulous hedge fund managers and Ponzi schemers betting on the downfall of their own and other nations.
So, there’s Barrack blustering over the war and the economy in his professorial tweeds, his sweet and sexy demeanor softening the hearts of the liberal elite and providing drama and focus for the next lot-the emboldened white Christian right. There he is dithering over healthcare and everything continues just the way it was.
Am I the only one who can’t imagine Tim Geitner having sex with anyone other than himself? He is such a WEED.
If China wasn’t running the world-this could look dangerous!
When British politicians get caught with their hand in the till-what paltry amounts of money they steal! Awarding their friends dodgy $150,000 construction contracts and creaming a few quid and a meat pie for themselves…subsequently getting caught and fired. An American politician wouldn’t waste his time or his position stealing so little. Tony Blair is the only politician to get away with stealing real money. He got away with the money and murder. He understood what few in the UK do-that American politicians are not elected to represent their constituents but to steal as much money as they can within their 4 years in office.
And, you might ask, why shouldn’t he? The Blair’s are just doing what the Royal family and the landed gentry have done for hundreds of years. He just took what he thought he was owed for getting to the top of the pile. It must piss our lowly politicians off to go through all the pain of getting elected to public office and then once there, look around…bleak…lonely…underpaid. Servants of the democracy that we hold dear and never really getting what they deserve-compared with the politicians in the USA who are on the fucking gravy train!
Drill baby drill, bailouts, healthcare, there’s money in them there policies..money for every politician in Washington, TONS OF IT! Politicians accepting donations from whomever and where ever.
Poor old Dennis Kucinich-he’s the congressman President Obama lassoed into helping change the mind of the bold progressives who were holding out for a radical public option during the last few moments before the Healthcare Bill was forced into law.
Well, dear Dennis lives in a one room apartment in Washington…never accepts a dime from anyone..but he lives in a one-bedroom apartment with his wife Elizabeth. If he had played his cards right, abandoned his principles and cut himself free from the people he was sent to represent then he could be living in a huge house in Georgetown-which is what the people expect by the way. To the average American there is something vaguely retarded about a man who is able to steal the money but doesn’t.
That’s why we elected you into office! To steal the money but, mind you, not so much that you piss the other thieves off who have seniority or think you are stealing too much. Of course, once in a while an odd politician needs to be thrown to the lions so that the public think that the other politicians have some sort of morality.
This is America and once you get a handle on it it’s not that bad. As long as you understand that to survive here you have to learn how to steal. You have to learn how to lose. Learn how to pick yourself up. Not get trampled in the stampede.
You must definitely learn to rub belly..pat head..
Had a great night out with my friend Ryan. We headed over to Tod’s shoe store on Rodeo in Beverly Hills for a party that a bunch of worthy LAers were throwing to welcome Jeffrey Deitch the new MOCA director to a bunch of LA’s finest. Jessica Alba, Kate Beckinsale, Angelica Huston etc etc.
Met up with Miggy and her girlfriend and their charming journalist friend from the Sunday Times who had seen the sex rehab show. He seemed really impressed. It is so odd to have left something indelible in the life of another. It is even odder to have people come up to you who are well known (famous even) telling you how much you have helped them. Ended up chatting to Gavin Rossdale about our friend Sebastian Horsley who is best known for crucifying himself in the Philippines-with real nails in his palms. He then fell off the cross.
Leaving something indelible stayed with me throughout dinner at the 101-where we ate the Thursday Fried Chicken Special of course.
I was going onto another party but bailed after dinner, I need to be on my own. To get used to it once again.
Indelible, irrevocable-something irrevocable. Changing somebody irrevocably. I may have done that too often to count on the fingers of two hands.
This time I am changed irrevocably. Something has shifted in me. Most of the people I have gotten close to recently have in some way been associated with or saw the sex rehab show. My generous NYC friend, my recently ended relationship and Jennie, let’s not forget Jennie. I think it maybe time to reconnect to those I knew before.
I think that even though these new friends know my story they don’t really take how seriously I believe in the power of recovery. I really do believe in the tenets of AA. I really do.
I came so close during the past month to using alcohol and drugs because I so desperately wanted to fit in with my new friend. I told him that I would take drugs so our sex life would get better. I thought about taking a drink. I seriously considered it. But if I had what would I have been left with now? Nothing. No relationship, no sobriety, absolutely nothing. At the end of the day all I own is my sobriety and my name.
There are fire trucks outside the building.
So, I pass through to the other side. Where I am on my own again. With out recourse to long, late night conversations. I am on my own and happy to be so.
The other burgeoning relationship in my life is with a young man who came to me for help with his sex addiction. He came along at just the right moment. To help him recover from a masturbation addiction. He checks in every day and God, yet again, is doing for me what I refuse to do for myself. Rather than drowning in self-pity I am helping a man less fortunate than myself and so, yet again, I am changed, refocused.
I had a short text exchange with the other this evening and rather than making me hanker for him it just made things easier to deal with. My darling New York boy is on his true path and that, I suppose, is something to do with me. A helping hand out of the darkness and into the light. An irrevocable change.
How many people fall in love with the person who helps save their life? Not many. Who is falling in love with the firemen or the nurse or the doctor?
Very sleepy now. I need to sink under the sheets and tomorrow-well perhaps I will be able to write the other stuff I write. Maybe.
There are occasions in life when no really means no. I am not really the kind of guy who accepts no for an answer but occasionally I hear the word No and I can’t possibly ignore the implications.
When I first got sober I had to make endless amends to many people. I had to address the wreckage of my past. It is not always easy to hear an apology so I rarely use the word sorry. When I had to make amends to people I had hurt whilst using drugs and alcohol I started any apology with these words: “I was wrong.” I was wrong to have stolen from you, I was wrong to have lied to you, I was wrong to have deceived you etc. etc.
Some people were simply no longer around to make amends to or some I had made so angry that they could never hear even one word from me let alone an apology so I made, what we call, a living amends, which meant that whatever I had done to the aggrieved I would never do again to another person. That if I had cheated I would not cheat. If I had stolen I would not steal.
Obviously they, the other, would not care either way if I cheated or stole ever again but my commitment to the living amends meant that I never need bring more people to the same sad conclusion about me. This may seem obvious to you but to a selfish, self obsessed addict this is not obvious at all.
I am in an odd mood today. I am happy but I am expecting the worst. I am sure about my path but too lazy to take the next step.
Insanely busy day yesterday. Climbed Runyon. Popped over to see Amanda and Kay. Saw Sean over in Malibu at his farm. Had lunch with Mel. Drove home, CRAWLED home on the congested 10 Freeway and then couldn’t, for the life of me, find parking so parked illegally. I was just desperate to get under a hot shower. Thankfully, I did not get another parking ticket.
Had delicious dinner last night at Osteria Mozza. Actually, it was an OK dinner but the company was great. The food was expensive and poorly executed. I sent the first course back because it was literally inedible. Bad food made better with inspiring conversation. I left my phone in the car so when I got back there were lovely text messages to read.
I slept long and hard.
This morning had very long, shitty conversation with HSBC in the UK. Really bad. Then, on the way to Runyon, my friend JP called me to make a reservation for him at a restaurant he couldn’t get into but apparently I can. Made me feel like a glorified personal assistant. Had long, very long (but delightful) conversation with Philippa about my June trip back home to the UK. I really can’t wait to get home for a little while.
The NO came after that. It was so definite and clear but rather than it rattling me I simply asked to get my own needs met and handed the whole caboose and caboodle over to God.
I wore a Helmet Lang jacket this evening that I have not worn for years. It felt great. I trotted off for dinner with my friend Dom and his sweet friends.
I was late. As I walked over I ended up on the telephone with you know who. I needed to break things off, or rather recalibrate my relationship with my dear New York friend. Break things was what I tried not to do; he is already a broken man. I failed. I was heavy handed and abrupt. In spite of my best intentions the seething resentment and obsession and mad thoughts spewed out of me because I couldn’t hold them inside for one minute longer.
The day ended thus. I felt free for the first time in weeks.
The day began very badly.
This morning, after the 10-second earthquake, I stood naked in the middle of my sitting room sobbing like a baby because all I could think about was him and all I wanted to be rid of was the thought of him. Our friendship has been so fucking overwhelming-watching him fall apart, pick himself up and be there for him without ever thinking what was best for me.
My fantasy was that a man twenty years younger than me who I met for the first time three short months ago would fall in love, move to LA and get a job in the film industry. How INSANE is that?
I prayed, “Send me somebody who’s strong and somewhat sincere.”
The good news is that tonight, after our chat, I am feeling a little more like myself. I have come clean with those I love and admit that I have been looking at pornography rabidly for the past week-as of old-so intense was the feeling.
Whenever I am feeling vulnerable I resort to my old friend-pornography.
Tomorrow I will try for one day of abstinence. I will try to get through the night without looking at that heaving pile of stinking pink flesh claiming me with so many muscular arms. For the past week I have stuffed my feelings with porn, cigarettes and food.
My flat is dirty, my clothes strewn over the floor.
This is a lesson in unmanageability, I am powerless over…well, fill in the fucking blank.
You see, I thought that I was falling in love but I was just held hostage by intensity.
The past three months have been wrought with emotion-watching someone I deeply care about tear himself and his life to pieces and being judged for doing so by people who fail to understand his predicament.
The point is-his problem is not my problem and I foolishly shouldered the entire burden of his life.
I have choices yet my choices diminish the moment I get obsessed-a hideous chain reaction then unfolds before me: Obsession, resentment, anger. When the pain becomes too much to bare, when I finally get angry enough to reclaim who I really am, then I feel shame for getting viciously angry-then remorseful for how I treated those I love.
My dearest friend I want to thank you for the privilege of watching you be brave. For demonstrating how the truth can set you free. Now, fly like a bird my darling. Soar as high as your tiny wings will carry you. Never settle for second best. Don’t give yourself away to fools or liars. From this moment on always tell the truth. Never tell people what you think they want to hear. Be true to yourself.
Life is never without lessons to learn and I have learned a great deal during these three amazing months.
You know, my dear, we have our finest days to come but probably as great friends and not as fuck buddies.
And so to bed. I am so tired. So bloody tired. I may even sleep tonight. Let’s hope so shall we?
Interesting day yesterday-after a good twenty four hours of stinking thinking-God delivered to me an old fashioned day of wonder. Began in Hollywood drinking Turkish coffee. My mood dramatically shifted from the day before when I felt so utterly wretched. I could have climbed Runyon but didn’t. I could have bought a pack of cigarettes but didn’t.
Peter arrived and took 20 works of art and furniture for sale and you know what? So crowded with stuff is this apartment that as quickly as he removed things I hung stored paintings in their place. After he left I felt relieved that so much had gone-all part of my less is more project. I can now walk all the way around my bed! My bedroom was crammed with too many things. As well as a queen sized bed there was a huge Jasper Morrison sofa stuffed in there. Frankly, I hadn’t really liked most of the sold work. I bought it for all the wrong reasons. Things were mostly collected to show off my great knowledge of contemporary art. Yeah right.
Jenny A not Jennie K (we are still avoiding each other) called me from Solar de Cauenga on the corner of Cauenga and Franklin to drink more coffee. The little dog and I sauntered down Franklin to see her. The weather has been spectacular, warm and spring like. Daffodils sprouting up all over the place, the trees budding, the birds singing, the air is fresh and clean after all the glorious rain.
I hadn’t seen Jenny A for a couple of years-not since I stayed in her beautiful home in Todos Santos. You can stay there too if you visit her WEB SITE it’s now THE most perfect hotel. Anyway, we hadn’t spoken since I climbed onto that dusty Mexican bus-but it was only a matter of time before we did. We are both incredibly fractious and proud so when we spend time with each other have tended toward the dramatic. Anyway, that was then and this is now: two calm, evolved human beings having a quiet latte together in a noisy café. She looks wonderful.
A young filmmaker came visiting after I returned form my time with Jenny. Josh, a Persian Jew looking for an internship somewhere. Oh God! He sat there and I just couldn’t wait for him to leave. No life, no experience, no opinions, no point of view-no heroes! How could he ever expect to be a filmmaker? He told me that he wanted to ‘change film making’ yet, as usual, when you ask who his favorite filmmakers were he was hard pressed to tell me. Like so many wannabe directors he was just a kid who liked movies, the difference being that this kid was raised in LA yet knew nothing about the city in which he was raised nor the industry that he says he wants to be part of-in fact he had no interests in anything apart from soccer and his girlfriend. I told him I could not help him and he left. It was like meeting a 40 something married guy. Do any of these kids have heroes? What happened to boys having heroes? I had all sorts of heroes when I was a boy.
I dashed to my car and headed to Malibu.
When I arrived Patrick the gardener was hanging around doing I don’t know what but it was nice to see him. I cleaned the house, laid a couple of rugs that had been sitting around in H’wood and then decided to go to Nina Hagen’s listening party at the recording studio next door.
Nina Hagen must have used the word Jesus at least 20 times to describe her new life as a Born Again Christian-she has renounced Buddhism. She told me that Jesus was guiding her, that Jesus was showing her the way etc etc. With flowers in her trademark two-ponytail hairstyle this slight mother of two is haggard but vibrant. She avoids looking directly into ones face. I ate a delicious cream puff. However, I didn’t stick around to listen to the album, as I was worried that the constant references to Jesus would make me laugh out loud.
At 3pm I met Stephen Fry at the Peninsular Hotel. Bumped into Donall McCusker who had worked on AKA but is now one of the producers of The Hurt Locker. Stephen and I ate scones and silly finger sandwiches and the staff made a terrible fuss about the little dog not being allowed-which we ignored. Stephen is writing the second part of his autobiography. Since my therapy I have walked into most situations free of shame and I am glad to report that today was no exception. I am usually so ashamed of my lack of formal education, my slight career, my meager achievements that sitting before this intellectual giant can shrivel any attempt I may have at a passable attempt at being anything other than a good natured baboon. Today I just felt like a man with nothing to prove-just enjoying him and his extraordinariness. In fact, I felt so comfortable I told him my great app idea, which he really liked.
As we left I introduced Stephen to Donall who was sitting with a group of execs-Donall called later to say that as Stephen and I walked away he was excited to have met Stephen Fry but his guests were more excited to know if I was really me (Duncan Roy). Funny eh? The power of reality TV. SF drove away in his mini.
Met John and Jamie at Phyllis Morris for more diet coke and discussed my previous days misery. They gave me three yards of heavy oyster colored upholstery silk from Osborn and Little to recover the chair JB didn’t buy.
Dinner with Chrissie Isley and Michelle Collins amongst others. We ate delicious chicken, asparagus and green beans. Strawberries and real whipped cream-Hungarian chocolate with pear. Our hosts had vegetables growing in tiny garden. Nearly fell asleep at the table even though conversation was good, Michelle very funny. We discussed Lulu, Soho House, Obama and David Cameron-apparently he isn’t going to win the general election.
Brought home fresh bananas, lemons and tangerines from my trees.
It was an early morning yesterday. I was up before the dawn. And I really have enjoyed my stay. But I must be moving on.
Sexual anorexia is a term used to describe a loss of “appetite” for romantic-sexual interaction but can be better defined as a fear of intimacy to the point that the person has severe anxiety surrounding sex with emotional content.
4am, Saturday morning. It is almost impossible to sleep. My lover is in town. My sleep schedule rearranged as I learn all over again to share my bed.
We have been in and out of bed all weekend and whilst it is reassuring to have this oversexed lil monkey crawling all over me I end up thinking far too much-both good and bad. The bad thoughts: wanting to escape, trying to remember old conquests, those perfect pornographic moments that always get me off. The good thoughts: fully engaging with newly learned sexual behaviors/insights. It is delightful to be mainly present during the sex. Now, when I say sex what are you thinking? The sex I have is, I am sure, nothing like most people.
When Bill Maher condemns sex addicts I doubt that he understands that most men who consider themselves sex addicts are not having the sort of sex that he is having. They are not meeting, fucking, cumming and leaving. Many men identify as sex addicts but the men I identify most with are actually porn addicts who seldom leave their apartments or Internet addicts on hook up sites with multiple on-line personalities. These men exist apart from the Tiger Woods variety of sex addicts: men who hook up with women or other men whilst wives and children sleep oblivious at home.
Bill Maher’s limited understanding of sex addiction and general scoffing negates those of us who work daily in order not to retraumatize ourselves. Bill Maher is certainly not recreating moments of childhood fear; he is not replicating perfect porno moments nor dealing with erectile dysfunction.
Tiger Woods may be a serial cheater but his story is the exception rather than the rule. Those of us who compulsively masturbate seldom get to meet anyone at all regardless of our engaging personalities. Addicted to the soothing effect of ejaculation, the calming thoughtless moments just after we shoot our dwindling load.
1983. I answered an ad in Time Out for gay performers who wanted to make a play with Neil Bartlett for the Institute of Contemporary Art about pornography. Drawing on historical texts, Diaries of a Marianne (attributed to Oscar Wilde) for instance, we all at once celebrated and condemned the production, consumption and effects of pornography. In one scene we compared the fantasy of pornography with the reality of our own sex lives.
After our 10 city tour in the UK and Canada I went home and never gave the polemic we were positing another thought, yet had I… my life would have turned out very differently.
How has gay pornography influenced my thinking, my relationships, my life?
Pornography has ruined my sexual expectations. Pornography: where men together do not tenderly hold each other, look into each other’s eyes, do not cry gently, do not laugh out loud, and do not ‘fail’ with half hard cocks. The perfect bodies, sexual performance and youth of most gay porn stars are impossible acts to follow.
Yet, the moment I get into bed with a man I try to emulate what I see in pornography. My stance is both dominant and aggressive, my voice lowers, I am uncharacteristically clumsy, and my kisses are full lipped. I have no idea what the end point of any sexual encounter is because I have so rarely ejaculated with another human being. I am rarely even in the same room because I am off in fantasy. I am rarely hard.
My lover is sexually submissive so what good am I to him if I am so full of fear that my cock does not get hard? That at the back of my mind I know my darling pornography waits to own me the moment he is gone? How many men cheat on their wives/boyfriends with pornography?
The past few days of sexual activity have been perhaps the best of my life because I am at least in the same room as the man I have elected to sleep with. I am authentic, present, calm and honest. I tell him the truth. Perhaps too much talking but frankly I would rather talk than be absent. There has been a great deal of consolation since he arrived. There has been a remarkable kindness. I no longer objectify him nor resent him simply because he sees who and what I am.
With the truth comes vulnerability, certainly never evident in pornography unless it’s a ‘mans first time’ with another man. Then the gay for pay virgin simply looks confused or humbled by desire. I have wasted so many years to pornography, so many wasted opportunities, so much lost love.
Men have humiliated me. I have, in turn, humiliated men. I have defined myself by my inability rather than my gifts. I have invested in my defects rather than my talent.
I am trying to have a few wonderful moments before my lover leaves LA and God knows if I will ever see him again. Of this I am sure: we got to know each other before we lay together. This meant that I had no shame when he finally held me in his arms. That I felt comfortable enough to let him know what was going on with me when I could not perform as perhaps he wanted me to perform. That we continue to laugh and cry and feel comfortable doing so.
I only have until Friday and I am going to make the most of it-before he returns to his own war zone and I to mine.
I needed to stay in home alone tonight. I feel sad. Sad about Kristian, sad about my friends who died this year and sad that once again I am on my own: the vacuum left behind after a wonderful weekend with a great friend.
I have always had and certainly will continue to have a serious problem with goodbye. Saying goodbye permanently or even temporarily brings up huge feelings of loss, vulnerability and then the anger-the anger overwhelms me.
The genesis of these feelings: I was ripped from my mother’s breast and put up for adoption. These are primal fears of life and death. The most profoundly affecting goodbye after my mother’s abandonment was the death of my Darling Big Dog.
When my dog was violently killed the resulting anguish unleashed a torrent of sadness, a great wave of misery that may have resulted from not ever having said goodbye-ever to anyone I loved. I did not go to my grandfather’s funeral nor my grandmother’s. I have rigorously avoided any ritual goodbye and for that I am a lesser man.
Whenever I leave a party I just slip away as if saying goodbye will somehow humiliate me.
The same feelings overcome me now after the deaths of three friends in as many months. Yet the very act of writing about them lends me immediate solace.
The end of relationships causes me unrelenting heartache.
Stoically accepting the end of a relationship? No, not for me. Nearly all of the relationships I have had have ended badly. I never, it seems, get to write that scene in the movie of my life where two people say a dignified goodbye.
The end of my relationship with Joe ended thus: I knew that I was going to leave but it took me 2 years to end it and when I finally did I tried to do it with tenderness and compassion but he was so angry that he made my life miserable for a full year after I left him-ending up in court fighting over property.
In my mad head I forget that I have choices, the choice to remember that the past no longer runs the show, choices to say goodbye without the reenactment of traumatic and ruinous scenarios.
Today I waved goodbye to a new friend who has come to mean a great deal to me. Whether there is any romantic future between us is really not up to me-unless I behave in such a way that he would never want to see me again. This morning I began to get angry, angry that he was leaving but knew that it was for the best.
Even though I was only momentarily angry-until I could identify what was going on in my mad head and break the cycle of abandonment and despair by telling him that I would miss him, that I was feeling sad, that I had no mechanism for making those feelings go away…and by telling him the truth I was freed from behaviors that would alienate him from me forever.
I will say goodbye to Kristian this week, say my heartfelt adieu. His death has brought up all sorts of STUFF. I sorted out pictures of us today and will post them as soon as I can.
It is a world of wonder. The day opens thus: the clouds have cleared over Los Angeles. The sun is bright and the air is clean. The birds are singing. The squirrels are playing in the palm trees within feet of my window.
Everyday I wake up is a new day to think about what life has to offer and I am all at once terrified and enchanted.
I frantically tidied the house, put all the clothes that were stacked in my room in their correct places. I remembered to fold my teeshirts and not put things in draws that were inside out.
I have to move the car at 9am so I don’t get a parking ticket. The little dog is looking at me expectantly. We need to walk, we need to take the trash to the building dumpster. We need to go to yet another 12-step meeting and rip my heart open again and again.
I want to smoke cigarettes. I want to lay in bed and not feel. Please.
Right here, right now. That’s what John A says. Reminding me to stay right here right now. Not yesterday or tomorrow. Right here, right now.
Everything happens for a reason. Collating the artwork made me take an essential inventory. It seems that there is more value in what I own than I first suspected. The choices I made for 20 years have been good ones.
Everything happens for a reason. That’s what they say. That’s what they tell me. That’s what I have come to believe. The plan is set, the dye is cast.
I felt sickly last night, too sickly to leave the house then spontaneously decided to visit my friends Anna and Melanie. Driving through the heavy rain the little dog and I arrived in Silverlake and ate slow roasted pork, black beans, plantains and lemon sorbet. Chatted to my arty filmmaker friends and loved every minute. Drove home, lay in bed waiting for the anticipated thunder but none came.
Silverlake, Los Felis, Arcadia, La Canada, Flitridge, Brentwood, Malibu, Santa Monica, Pasadena, the map of LA unfolding like an old linen backed map in my head. The freeways, the concrete LA river, the Pacific Ocean all wrote in Indian ink.
I once owned a 17th century map of Venice that I found in a library in Dorset when I was a boy. It was folded into a marbled envelope and each painstakingly hand drawn section of that map remains engraved in my memory.
Venice stretches across 117 small islands in the marshy Venetian Lagoon along the Adriatic Sea in northeast Italy.
For a moment this morning I remembered that map and wished to be magically transported to the saltwater lagoons that stretch lazily along the shoreline between the mouths of the Po and the Piave Rivers.
When I die the various maps of many cities will be lost. I think often of that. The many and various maps of all the cities I explored that will be lost along with the smell of fresh snow, the taste of my lovers mouth, the unmistakable sound of my own childish footsteps running down warm unusual, sunlit corridors.
Busy, busy, busy! Fled, after my morning meeting, to the bank and Malibu and back again. The misty garden smelling of jasmine and other, sweeter perfumes. I love the way the garden evolves. Wood chip paths and great forests of Euphorbia down where the goats will live.
